Bungie's live-service shooter Marathon has a grenade problem that won't go away. Players are drowning in explosives, and their patience has evaporated. The developer already nerfed grenades once, but that fix barely made a dent. Now Bungie is promising to adjust stack sizes, the amount of grenades players can carry at once, to actually address the spam.
The core issue: grenades remain so effective and abundant that matches devolve into a constant bombardment. Players can't move, can't breathe, can't engage with the game's other mechanics. It's a balance problem that breaks the fundamental experience. Bungie's previous nerf attempted to dial things back, but clearly didn't go far enough. Stack size adjustments might finally force players to make real tactical choices about when to use grenades instead of treating them as a default strategy.
For a live-service game still building its player base, this kind of persistent balance failure erodes trust. Players tolerate some growing pains at launch, but when a problem survives a patch and the fix feels incremental rather than decisive, it reads as tone-deaf. Bungie needs this adjustment to land hard enough that grenades stop defining every engagement. Otherwise, Marathon risks losing players who simply got tired of getting pelted.